INTRODUCTION

How can designers instigate a process of recovery and renewal following a disaster in manners that engage people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds? Following the March 11, 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, my students and I faced the challenge of designing an interactive, temporary installation that would become a part of earthquake relief fundraising concert at Japan Society in New York City. Constructed and installed during the Tohoku earthquake relief fundraising event, CONCERT FOR JAPAN, at the Japan Society on April 9, 2011, The Luminous Washi Lanterns was a celebration of renewal and recovery through light and impermanent materials. The work explores and celebrates the ephemeral, fleeting nature of materials traditionally used in Japanese rituals and events. The lanterns were designed as a part of an intensive design studio class at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) over the four months preceding the event. Over the twelve hours of the concert, the students ran a workshop to teach hundreds of visitors with varying skills and age levels to fold the lanterns and collectively hang them. The participants were also given an opportunity to write wishes or make drawings for the survivors on tanzaku, a piece of paper traditionally used for writing poetry, and tie them on bamboo frames along with their lanterns.

The project raised these additional questions:

1. How can traditional renewal rituals of Japan be translated into a work of art that engages people outside of Japan?
2. How do impermanent materials such as paper provide a sense of renewal in Japanese culture?
3. What form of participation will allow the makers as well as the viewers to be renewed and empowered?

The paper will examine aspects of Japanese culture that were translated in a contemporary American context, the design process of the Luminous Washi Lanterns, and the outcome and impact of the installation.

1. Luminous Washi Lanterns installed in Japan Society’s atrium

EPHEMERALITY IN JAPANESE RENEWAL RITUALS AND EVENTS

In Japanese language, the word for the ephemeral is 泡沫(pronounced houmatsu), meaning ‘a bubble on surface of liquid’, indicative of the intimate connection between the ephemeral and nature. Renewal rituals and built environments have been intrinsically tied in Japanese culture since the ancient times. Every twenty years since 785, the Naiku and Geku shrines at the Grand Ise Shrine have been dismantled and rebuilt to the exact specification on an adjacent site next to the old structures. This is consistent with Shintoist understanding that nature lives and dies, that it is continually renewed and reborn. The belief in the impermanence of all things, the process of constant renewal, has been at the core of Japanese environments.

In his book Japan-ness in Architecture, architect Arata Isozaki argues that while the Greek temples’ stone columns with entasis (slight convex curve of its shaft) is said to be preserving its root to having been made from a bundle of plants and attempts to attain permanence by being built in stone, Ise omits this transubstantiation. Isozaki says Ise sustains identity through repetition:

At Ise…the rebuilding-and-relocation scheme of twenty-year cycles embraces a biological model of regeneration. In order to preserve life, forms are generated and regenerated isomorphically. In this manner, Ise ensures a replica of itself, daring to retain those impermanent elements such as hottate-bashira (massive bearing columns without stone bases) and thatch of miscanthus. In the process, architectural and ritual impetus strive to preserve identify through maintenance of an archetypal form (Isozaki 2006:145).

Ise’s renewal ritual and the duplex mechanism of renewal in which the new shrine is constructed adjacent to the old, is explained and analyzed in great deal in Gunter Nitschke’s essay “Daijosai and Shikinen Sengu – First Fruits Twice Tasted”. In this essay can be traced reasons why impermanence is valued in Japanese culture. Nitschke claims that that the sanctuaries in earliest phase of Shinto had no permanent shrine buildings, but “the layout and rites were structured by the dynamic, non-stationary quality of the agricultural deity, which was venerated as a mountain deity in winter and a field deity from spring to autumn.” There are rituals for calling down the deity from the mountain, and a separate set of rituals for sending the deity back up the mountain (Nitschke 1993:23-24). These deities did not live permanently in one place but came and went with seasons. This might help to explain why the Japanese are highly aware of changes in natural surroundings and why holidays and rituals are intimately connected to the seasons. It may also elucidate why passing on of rituals from one generation to another may be more valued than the permanence of materials or buildings. Luminous Washi Lanterns installation is as much about the rituals and collective experiences through passing of rituals as it is about the physical work of art.

In everyday life, no other ritual exemplifies Japanese ephemerality as a cherry blossom viewing. Anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, in her paper “Cherry Blossoms and Their Viewing: A Window onto Japanese Culture”, traces the background of cherry blossoms to its roots in the agrarian cosmology in which the deity of the Mountains comes down from the hills to become the Deity of Rice Paddies. As cherry trees grew in the mountains, cherry blossoms symbolized the sacred mountains (Ohnuki-Tierny 1998:214). Over Japan’s history, the elite established their own identity through their rituals of cherry blossom viewing, accompanied by elaborate rituals of drinking, feasting, and composition and reading of poetry. Manyoshu (759 A.D.), the oldest collection of poems in Japan, contains references to cherry blossoms, and other poems about rural areas by unknown poets also embraced them (Ohnuki-Tierny 1998:219). In wartimes, cherry blossoms took on a Nationalist symbol. The military government used the beautiful, short life of cherry blossom to urge soldiers to die for their country.

Today, cherry blossom season is associated with spring, the season of renewal and rebirth; it is the start of the school year, the fiscal year, and the time of new hiring at companies. For people of all classes, farmers and urbanites alike, cherry blossom viewing holds an enormous importance to companies and families. There is a frenzy of excitement every March as viewing and festival take place starting in the southernmost islands of Okinawa moving north to Hokkaido (Ohnuki-Tierny 1998:224). The occasion is a collective ritual used to strengthen the group bond, whether they are families or coworkers (Ohnuki-Tierny 1998:231).

Japan is one in a small number of countries to officially designate the title of National Living Treasure to a living person practicing a craft. While the US and other countries bestow such status to historic monuments or parks, which are then placed on the National Historic Register, Japan designates people who embody intangible cultural values as National Living Treasures. There is greater value placed on the process or craftmanship associated with making of the artifacts than the artifacts themselves(Hakomori 2002:86). These people will eventually age and die, so these treasures are impermanent. However, what is preserved and protected are the processes and skills that are passed on from one generation to another.

Yo-ichiro Hakomori, in his chapter “The Sacred and the Profane in Matsuri Structures” writes how the matsuri, seasonal festival specific to local harvest and cultural traditions, embody Japanese Shintoist and Buddhist beliefs in the ephemerality of all things and beings.

The ancient Japanese made no clear spiritual distinction between gods, inanimate objects, natural objects, and human beings. Many natural objects such as large stones, mountains, the sun and large trees were thought to possess spirituality. Natural phenomena such as the wind or thunder were thought to possess spirituality. Great man-made products, such as swords or brilliant mirrors, jewels, and sometimes the shrine structures themselves, were also believed to possess spirituality (Hakomori 2002:79).

If spirituality can be possessed by wind, stones and shrines alike, this provides insights into questions why permanence is not as highly valued, why there is a high level of craftsmanship in humble materials such as paper or rope, and why permanence and impermanence are both highly valued.

There are various types of matsuri structures, which are all displayed or carried by festival participants only during the few days of the festival. These temporary structures are believed to mediate between the sacred, the deity that descends from the mountains during the festival, and the profane, the townspeople (Hakomori 2002:78). The deity is taking temporary shelter in a portable shrine that is festively carried around town, so it becomes understandable why preparing and construction of the structures are done with great attention and care.

There are many examples of small, temporary structures in Japanese culture that grow as public participants add to them. At shrines, visitors buy paper omikuji (fortune telling paper strips) which they tie to trees on the temple yard or a wooden scaffolding that is built hold the paper strips. On July 7, for the Tanabata star festival, children decorate bamboo trees with paper garlands much like a Christmas tree, though with a shorter lifespan of a few days. Following the tradition of writing short poems, children today write wishes on strips of paper, or tanzaku, and hang them on the bamboo branches.

Washi is the Japanese term for handmade paper (wa=Japan, shi=paper), most commonly made with kozo (mulberry tree) fibers, which are some of the longest of all papermaking fibers. While they are ‘delicate, wafer thin, translucent, soft and absorbent,’ they posses strength as a result of the long fibers, and have many uses beyond writing and printing. They are also used to make fans, dolls, clothing, umbrellas, and shoji and fusuma room divider screens. Handmade washi is said to possess “a certain kansei, which roughly translated means the paper is imbued with the maker’s character, his perceptions, his attitudes, his feelings, his outlook and his generations of inherited skills” (Turner 1991:36-37).